Bruce Larson is back in the pastorate now, after twenty-one years of traveling, speaking, writing, and serving as president of Faith at Work. He has thus put himself on the receiving end of his own exhortations about fellowship and community in the church. Seattle’s well-established, block-long University Presbyterian Church is the scene where Larson is working out what he urged in such books as No Longer Strangers, The One and Only You, and The Relational Revolution.
LEADERSHIP wondered how the man who invented the phrase relational theology would view the current state of church fellowship. How far have we come? Have we made progress over the past three decades? Are we closer to one another, more honest, more caring? Senior Editor Dean Merrill went to Seattle to ask.
You grew up in a solid church in Chicago. When did it first dawn on you that Christians were missing something in the area of fellowship or intimacy?
I was a student minister at a little church up on the Hudson River-I’d go up every weekend from Princeton, where I was in seminary. I met my wife in that church, in fact. “Fellowship” consisted of a monthly meeting of the women’s association and an occasional men’s breakfast, where you had a baseball or football player come in and give his testimony.
Then one weekend, I found out some shocking news: a teenage girl in the congregation had left town to go to her older brother’s. She was pregnant. I said to the dear woman who told me, “Could I go and see her?”
“Oh, no,” she replied. “You’re the last person she wants to know what’s happened.”
Suddenly it hit me: That’s what’s wrong with the church in our time. It’s the place you go when you put on your best clothes; you sit in Sunday school, you worship, you have a potluck dinner together-but you don’t bring your life! You leave behind all your pain, your brokenness, your hopes, even your joys.
How much have we changed since then? Have we made progress?
I think in almost any church of any size there are now at least some people trying to be real, asking, “What does it mean for me to belong to Jesus Christ and also to belong to his family?”
You see, God asks us three questions when we try to get close to him. They are not true-or-false questions; they are yes-or-no. Lots of people say “True” to the Atonement, the Resurrection, the Second Coming, but that’s like saying, “True, I believe in marriage.” Not until you say “Yes” to a person are you actually married.
So God’s first question is not “Do you believe in the concept of discipleship?” It is rather this:
1. “Will you trust me with your life, yes or no?” That’s what he said to Abram: “Will you leave the familiar, sell your house, pack up your goods, and move out?”
He didn’t ask Mary whether she assented to the doctrine of the Incarnation; he said, “Will you be the unwed mother of the Messiah, even though you’ll probably never be able to convince your parents, your neighbors, or the rabbi that you didn’t have an affair? Will you trust me?”
As a church boy growing up, I said “True” a lot of times. But it wasn’t until one night in 1945, while standing guard duty in a bombed-out building in Stuttgart, thinking very hard about my life and what I’d be going home to, that I finally said “Yes” to God.
2. Next God asks, “Will you entrust yourself to a part of my family, yes or no?”
I was in seminary when I sensed God saying, “You know, you’ve never told anybody what your inner struggle is like. Only I know.”
“I’m looking for somebody good enough,” I said.
And God seemed to reply, “What do you mean?”
“Well, I can’t just trust my secrets to somebody like me. I’m a gossip, I’m irresponsible, judgmental, critical. If I could find somebody really good, I’d open my life.”
I remember God saying, “Well, Bruce, you’re about average. A few people may be a bit better than you, and a few a bit worse. But the deal is this: Will you, as an act of faith in me, entrust yourself to somebody like you?”
I said, “You’re kidding.”
But eventually I said, “OK, I will.” And when I did, it was like Pentecost for me. The power of God was suddenly released when I gave up being invulnerable.
To whom did you reveal your inner self?
Another fellow in seminary. He now teaches New Testament at Drew.
When I came here to Seattle, I said to this church, “Let me describe myself. I have an extraordinary measure of the gift of faith; I believe anything is possible with God. I also have a great gift of hope; I really believe tomorrow is going to be the dawn of the Christian era. But where I got shortchanged is in the area of love. I’m insecure, I’m touchy, I’m critical, I’m fault-finding-help me! I’m not a very good lover at all.”
That, incidentally, is why I write so much about love relationships-because I’m so poor at them. My life is strewn with broken and painful relationships. That’s why I’ve become a specialist, I guess, in these things! I’m basically selfish, a hermit. Before I came here, I lived six years on an island in the Gulf of Mexico; that tells you who I am. I preach intimacy and community because I need it so badly.
What’s the third yes?
Finally God says, “Will you get out and be involved someplace in the world? Will you try to walk my love, my Word, my character to somebody? Will you lose your life? Yes or no?”
Years ago Johannes C. Hoekendijk wrote much the same thing when he portrayed the kingdom of God with three New Testament words: kerygma, the proclamation that Jesus is lord; koinonia, the family fellowship; and diakonia, our service to the world. When people say “Yes” to all three, we have an alive church.
Why is church still a lonely place for some people?
First of all, I need to explain something: Loneliness is really a gift. It’s like pain. If we didn’t have physical pain, I’d take my wife to the beach for a picnic, step on a rusty nail, and say, Oh, I don’t want to interrupt the fun, so I’ll keep quiet. I’d soon be dead of lockjaw.
Loneliness is the psychic pain that drives us to do something about our isolation. God has made us for intimacy. It’s not our idea. He put within us a desire to belong to other people, whether we’re Christians or not. That’s just the way people are made. And Jesus Christ has defined the way to fulfill this deep need.
I would never risk sharing myself with somebody else unless I was driven to it by my pain. I can’t bear to be cut off anymore, so I finally open up in a small group or to an individual. Loneliness becomes the very ground of intimacy.
What are the reasons church people sometimes feel stymied with their loneliness?
The church, unfortunately, has become a museum to display the victorious life. We keep spotlighting people who say, “I’ve got it made. I used to be terrible, but then I met Jesus, got zapped by the Spirit, got into a small group, got the gifts and fruit of the Holy Spirit . . .” and the implication is that they are sinners emeritus. That’s just not true.
What we need in the church are models who fail, because most of us fail more than we succeed. We find success once in a while, and we praise God. But much of what we do is a flop. Every parent knows that. So does every spouse. We all fail our cities, our world.
We need to admit that. Even the biblical heroes failed. Abraham had only one puny kid; where was the great nation he dreamed of? Moses never entered the Promised Land. Jesus died saying, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Neither Peter nor Paul saw the full flowering of the church.
In the East African revival of the past forty years, the church has flourished because people have freely confessed their failures and sin. When we pretend that we once sinned but don’t now, we produce a church where loneliness is rampant, a place where I know I’m not making it but I assume everyone else is.
The church is not a museum for finished products. It is a hospital for the sick.
What are some of the quick fixes for loneliness being heralded today?
Christians think that if they read their Bibles enough or go to enough meetings and groups, they can be “cured” of loneliness. The Devil uses lots of cultural myths in this regard-for example, the idea that life is hard and cruel, but when the right guy with the glass slipper comes along in his Camaro, you’ll live happily ever after. So kids say, “Ah, marriage is the cure for loneliness,” and figure all the married people in church are problem-free. But when that doesn’t do the trick, they say they must have gotten the lemon in the grab bag of life.
The Playboy Philosophy says if you have sex with enough people, you won’t be lonely. The business world says success will do it. If I can become the president of AT&T or IBM, I won’t be lonely. In reality, the people at the top of any field are the loneliest of all.
Even Jesus on his last night in Gethsemane-he’s excruciatingly lonely. Has he taken the wrong road? If this is the right road, can he endure the crucifixion? He has only two choices: he can hide his loneliness or share it. He chooses to share it with three trusted friends . . . and they keep going to sleep on him.
Now we know Jesus is the model for the church. He is our supreme example. How many churches would welcome a pastor who, once in a while on a Saturday night, would call three elders or deacons and say, “Would you mind coming over to the parsonage?” They’d come, and then the pastor would say, “It’s been a tough couple of weeks. I haven’t prayed in ten days. I’m in the dark night of the soul. My wife and I aren’t speaking, I’m full of self-hate, and tomorrow is Sunday. I have to stand up and bring good news to the people, and I don’t have any good news. So I’m going to wrestle all night tonight, and I believe God can change me and deliver me-although he may not. I’m so terrified. I thought if you three came along and just kept me company while I prayed-the coffee pot’s on-you know, I really want to make it somehow. … “
A real New Testament church would say, “This pastor is just like Jesus.”
But we’re more prone to say, “No, you’ve got to have it all together. Smile a lot. Be successful.”
Our culture forces that kind of expectation, doesn’t it?
Certainly. We have two particular problems in this regard.
One, we are a nation built by people who kept moving on. They started on the East Coast and kept heading westward whenever a problem arose. Ellen Goodman, the columnist, says that now, with no more geographical frontiers to move to, we’ve begun moving away from each other. The frontier is within, and we move away from our spouse or our family whenever we don’t know how to solve something.
I urge premarital intimacy with every couple who comes to me for a wedding. I didn’t say premarital sex; I said intimacy. I tell them, “I hope you’re sharing deeply about whatever is happening in your lives. If you do, you’ll have a super sex life after you’re married. The physical will be an expression of the spiritual. But if you try to be intimate through the physical only, it will soon become very boring.”
Our other problem is our consumer mentality. We go to a school and say, “I’ll give you money; educate me.” That’s impossible. All the school can do is provide stimulus and resource. We go to a doctor and say, “Make me well. Here’s the money; give me the pills, the surgery.”
We come to the church and say, “Give me faith; give me God. Here’s my money.” Faith and wholeness and intimacy are not so easily purchased. You have to take risks, to come out of the shell and let God have you. Here are the three yeses again.
Is the whole desire for intimacy insatiable? Will there always be church members crying, “Nobody loves me,” no matter how hard the leadership tries?
Yes! This is the trick God has played on us. If my needs could be solved by human intimacy, I wouldn’t need God. My marriage and my small group would be enough. But God says, “No, you’re going to need me. Your wonderful spouse and church are never enough.”
Then some church leaders would say, “Why worry about it? The lonely you have with you always. … “
Yes, but it will kill you. The new word from the medical community is that loneliness is the number one killer in America. James Lynch, the Johns Hopkins researcher who wrote The Broken Heart, has ten years of charts to back him up on this.
What’s your answer to someone who says mission/outreach is what’s really important, and Christians need to focus on the urgent tasks rather than their own feelings?
That is like a person saying, “I don’t need to eat-just work.”
It is true that we are to be productive people. Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches. But the branches must have nourishment through connection.
I think one of the failures of those who espoused great causes in the 1960s was that while their causes were just, the persons themselves kept breaking down, and so did their followers. They were unnourished. They became brittle and hard, and eventually cracked.
Christians, to be productive, need to be nourished, and we do this in community. We have no choice-God made us this way.
Jesus said in one place, “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” What is he talking about? What is this power to bind and loose?
Well, if all of us fail and none of us are sinners emeritus, we must be forgiven-Jesus says here that my release comes at the hands of another. That is one purpose of a small group: to loose crippled people from the sins that restrict them, to call forth gifts, to set people free, to deploy them in the world.
How have you implemented this nourishment at University Presbyterian?
When I came, I said to the thirty-six elders at the first Session retreat, “Now I plan to leave here someday in my right mind, full of love for God and myself and all of you, not diminished but expanded. I want to be everything God meant me to be. To do that, I need a few of you to hold me accountable.
“I want to meet with a few of you once a week for an hour and a half to pray, read the Bible, and share our lives. If you’re interested, let me know.”
Well, six of the men-none of the women, interestingly-came up one by one and said, “Count me in.” For almost four years now, we seven have met here every Tuesday morning at seven o’clock. We don’t talk church business; we talk about our lives, our marriages, our kids, our jobs, health, sex, money . . . we read the Bible, and we pray for each other. I ask them to help me be the man I’m supposed to be.
If I didn’t have a group like that, I couldn’t survive in this very busy church. I’d become plastic. Here is the “binding and loosing” Jesus spoke about. I am loosed every week by these men.
In my appointment calendar for every Tuesday, my secretary writes “The Seven Dwarfs.” (She gave us that name, we say, because she thinks she’s Snow White.)
Now I’ve never advertised what we do, but you can believe this congregation knows its pastor meets for an hour and a half every week with some men to pray and share their lives. I’m sure that’s one reason why we now have four to five hundred small groups going in this church. People don’t do what a pastor tells them to do; they watch what you do and then copy it.
Do you lead your Tuesday morning group?
Oh, no, no! The leader is whoever brings the doughnuts. That person comes prepared to guide us in the next section of whatever book of the Bible we’re studying.
When it comes time to share needs, we pass around a little three-minute hourglass, and that’s how long you get to talk. After all, we have jobs to get to, so we can’t talk forever. Then we pray.
Last summer, after spending three years together, we said, “Let’s have a day-long retreat.” So we went up to Whidbey Island. We started around the circle that morning with the question “What is a fate worse than death?”
By learning what my brothers were really terrified of, I came to know more about who they were. The seven of us had seven very different fears.
Then we said, “What are your dreams? What do you hope to accomplish if you live ten more years?” Again, the variety was great, because two of the men are young, two are middle-aged, and two are retired. See, when I was with Faith at Work, pastors always used to ask me, “How do you get small groups going in a church?” There is only one infallible way. You start one group because you need it. You don’t whip up a program. You don’t say, “This will be good for our church.” You say, “I have said yes to Jesus and yes to the family of God. Therefore I need to be in a group.”
Most churches fail to have groups because the pastor either doesn’t belong to one or else has started them for an ulterior reason: to increase membership, for example. If you want a tithing church, you’d better tithe. If you want a praying church, you’d better pray. If you want a fellowshipping church, you’d better be in a group.
What about your other thirty elders?
We spend the first forty-five minutes to an hour of every Session meeting sharing and praying in small groups. I said, “Some of you may be in a small group outside of this, but your leadership in this church will be felt more by how we live together and model authentic life than by the decisions we make about budget and staff and program. We’re not just a board of directors. We’re here as the elected, ordained leaders of this church, and they trust us to be something together.”
The result has been that Session meetings now get done around ten o’clock whereas they used to go on till midnight. We took an hour we couldn’t spare-and we get our work done earlier.
How are the rest of the people organized into groups? Do you assign?
Not at all. We simply model the importance of this experience and let people sort themselves out.
For example, two of our members, Jean and Les McMillan, picked up on something I’d preached about in Acts 5:12-16, where it tells about the early Christians meeting in a place called Solomon’s Porch, and whole crowds came there for healing. This was a public place, not a church building. So they said, “Why couldn’t there be a place for people to just drop in and be with Christians?” They settled on a Burger Chef, and every Friday noon this group gets together to laugh, cry, share, and set one another free.
The only organizing we do is in the fall each year, when we say on a Sunday, “If you’re not now in a small group and would like to be, come to such-and-such a place.”
Two or three hundred people usually show up-those who are new to the church or have gotten bypassed along the way. Old people, middle-aged people, young people, singles, marrieds-they all come. Then we say, “All right, when are you available? Who’d like to be in a group on Tuesday night? Wednesday noon? Saturday morning?” They match up right there on the spot.
As you can tell, this cuts across all the barriers. We don’t say a group is for marrieds, or career people, or whatever. They’re just Christians together.
Maggie Kuhn of the Grey Panthers, a great friend of mine, says, “The only place people can have an intergenerational experience these days is in the church.” We’re the one place to be a family together.
Are you swimming upstream in this regard? Don’t people prefer “their own kind”?
Perhaps a few do, but more of them are hungry for the chance to be with different age groups. Some of our groups span three generations. We’re even integrating our summer deputation teams now. This church has sent teams all over the world for twenty-five years, but last year we sent a team to East Germany that was a college student, a middle-aged couple, and an older couple. This month we’re sending an intergenerational medical team to Haiti.
A week from Sunday we’re having a “Winter Picnic” on Sunday afternoon, where all ages can come-kind of like an old camp meeting-for food and fun.
What’s the average size of your small groups?
Under twelve. Beyond that, you’re not a group; you’re a meeting.
Do husbands and wives generally stick together in your groups?
Some do, some don’t. It’s up to the couple.
How do you prevent groups from becoming ingrown?
Getting together just to have sweet fellowship is no good. The goal is to produce whole people. A group is where we are loved and forgiven and encouraged and affirmed and sent forth into the world. We have spelled out three kinds of mission very clearly: ministry, evangelism, and prophecy.
Ministry is Christian-to-Christian. We are all ministers when we unbind our brothers and sisters, listening, caring, loving.
Evangelism is Christian-to-unbeliever. Here we introduce someone to a Person: “Want to meet somebody?” In order to do this, we may go across the street or around the world.
Prophecy is speaking for God about the structures of society. Every member is called to be a prophet in his school, his hospital, her shop, her business, her factory, Boeing, wherever. We are to be God’s creative change agent in that situation, letting the Spirit of God say through us, “This isn’t good enough; we can do better. Here’s a new way. … “
If we don’t move toward these purposes, then the small group becomes a sterile pocket. It is meant to be a deploying center.
How often do you become frustrated in this whole area?
About once a week! I say, “What am I doing here? It’s not working.” And then I discover God is working after all.
It’s like skiing, which is something my kids finally got me to try only about fifteen years ago. When you’re just starting, you look down that slope and think Oh, no, and so you try to hug the hill as you go down. What happens? Your skis go out from under you every time. You eventually learn to lean out where it’s dangerous, and the farther you lean, the more your skis bite into the snow, and the safer you are. But it means unlearning all your normal survival instincts.
All of us in the church have been taught to play our cards close to the chest-don’t tell people what you’re really like, because they’ll use it against you. And they will! But if you do that, you die. As Jesus said, the more you lay down your life, the more you find it. The more vulnerable you become, the safer you are.
What about the small-town or rural congregation? Does relationship building need any encouragement there, or do things just happen naturally? In other words, are they automatically ahead of city and suburban churches?
I’ve served churches in three small towns. Yes, everyone knows each other-in fact, they’re often related to each other. But that doesn’t keep those towns from being some of the loneliest places on earth. Everybody knows so much that people are terrified. There’s a conspiracy of silence: “I know your secrets and you know mine, but we’re never going to talk about them.”
In a large city like Seattle, you can hide-or you can choose intimacy within a church community. In a small town, it almost takes more of the grace of God to have a breakthrough. It can happen; I’ve seen it. But it’s more terrifying.
How does it come about?
The same as anywhere else: when people can’t stand the faยade anymore. See, it doesn’t do any good to know someone’s secrets unless he tells them to you. That’s why we confess to God. He doesn’t need the information; he already knows our sins. But the forgiveness and healing can’t start until we say, “Here is my problem.”
It doesn’t work for me to say to you, “I know what your problem is.” That just destroys relationship. You have to come out with it first, and then I can minister to you.
In a small community, even though the hiding places are few, there’s no release until the person voluntarily says, “You know, I’ve been unfaithful, or I’ve defrauded someone, or I’m a closet homosexual,” or whatever.
It’s like when Jesus said to the man in the tombs, “What’s your name?”
The fellow said, “Well, I’ve got a lot of them. My name is Legion.”
Only then could Jesus start helping him. God doesn’t barge into a person’s life, and neither can we.
A church in whatever size town is to be a hospital where people can get well by the power of God. In order for that to happen, real community is a necessity. And you have to work at it.
Is it possible that small groups are just another fad? Will we remember them in the year 2000?
Certainly small groups are a fad, even a gimmick. They are an artificial step toward making the family of God a reality. But community is not a gimmick.
I hope the small-group movement dies out.
Seriously? What do you mean?
I hope we can make the whole church a place for God to heal people, to bind up their wounds and set them free. This requires a shared ministry, which requires intimacy, confession, openness, and the calling forth of gifts.
That’s what the Wesleys did with their class meetings. No more than twenty or thirty thousand Methodists changed the face of England by meeting in small groups and asking one another, “What is God telling you to change in your life?” They had deep koinonia, but from there they went out in deep diakonia as evangelists, ministers, missionaries, and prophets. Child labor laws were written, prisons were reformed, and slavery was abolished in the wake of these groups.
How many people change a nation, for better or worse? Maybe one percent. That’s all the Wesleys had. That’s also all Hitler had in the beginning.
As the pastor of a large church, you are now on the other side of the desk; you’re no longer the itinerant speaker/author encouraging small groups. Do you ever worry about what’s going on in all those living rooms without you? Do small groups erode authority?
A good question. (Pause)
If you are called by God to be a pastor, your authority is that he called you, not your perfection or brilliance. If your authority comes from pretending to be more than you are, that is the source of stress.
I am not adequate to be the pastor here or anywhere else. But I’ve been called by God to be here, and these people have called me here, so I go on.
I believe in proclaiming the Word of God with power. I believe that on Sunday morning I’m shooting with real bullets. So I declare what I think is God’s news for this part of his people in Seattle in 1984: “Here is what we should be and do and believe and act.”
But then I come down from the pulpit and say to them, “How in the world can we do that? How can I be that kind of father or husband or citizen? Help me! I’ve preached the blueprint, but we’re pilgrims in this together.”
If you pretend you’re doing everything you preach, people know you’re not, and you lose your authority. But if you let them help you, I think they respect you more.
Do small groups sometimes become power blocs?
Yes, if they want to.
How do you prevent that?
You can’t.
And that’s why some church leaders say it’s better not to have groups.
Or they say, “People have very serious needs, and if you turn them loose without a pastor in the circle, all kinds of weird things may happen.”
I respond by saying: What choice do you have, if you really mean to pastor them? Imagine a church of three hundred members. If you see all the people you can, spending an hour with five different people every day, that’s only twenty-five people a week. There’s no way you can tend to all their marriages and jobs and job changes and kids and . . .
Let’s face it: we’re in a situation like China under Mao, when they had to admit they lacked adequate health care for all those millions. The people were suffering, and the government had neither the time or the money to train enough doctors. So they invented the “barefoot doctor,” who, they said, could probably take care of 90 percent of people’s problems. The 10 percent would have to come into the city hospitals.
Was that the best way?
There wasn’t any alternative.
I believe with Paul Tournier that 90 percent of people’s problems are best dealt with by fellow strugglers, not psychiatrists, doctors, or clergy. Only about 10 percent need professional help. So we train people and turn them loose to pastor each other, saying, “If you hit a real stickler, come to one of the pastoral staff. Otherwise, you’re the barefoot doctor.”
How do you train group leaders?
Kind of ad hoc. To start with, all our applicants for church membership go through a ten-hour course that includes being part of a small group with a facilitator. In other words, you don’t just sit down and listen to left-brain presentations of the gospel; you also receive guidance and a chance to share your life. If the assignment is to read a certain book, you come back and tell how you’ve applied this in your office, your neighborhood, your home. So you can’t join this church without spending two months with five or six other people on a weekly basis.
Then there are other occasions for modeling and training. For example, we’re going to the Opera House for our two Easter services this year. That way we can accommodate around six thousand people. But the main reason is to have room for ministry to people between services.
In preparation for that, we’ll have a Saturday class on conversational counseling. We’ll train our people to walk up to a stranger and say something besides “Are you saved?” We’ll show how to move from chatting about the service to getting down to deep needs.
But we don’t have a course that turns out certified small-group leaders. This is not like acquiring a computer skill.
In the past four years, have any of your groups gotten seriously off track?
Not that I know of. We have individuals who’ve done some strange things in groups, and people have come to us saying, “What do we do with so-and-so?” But nothing bizarre.
Do you control the study content of your groups?
I suppose so, in that most of our groups use things like The Edge of Adventure, Living the Adventure, or The Passionate People, materials developed by Keith Miller, my wife, and me. These courses make leaders out of anyone who knows how to turn on the tape recorder, since they include cassette instructions. But there is still much room for leadership skills to come forth, and that is what I want to see happen.
In the life of the church worldwide, what work is still to be done regarding community? What do you hope happens during your remaining years in the ministry?
I really believe the whole frontier of medicine has to do with belonging and intimacy. That’s why I wrote the book There’s a Lot More to Health Than Not Being Sick. General practitioners say if they could spend an hour a week with each of their patients just talking-“How’s your job? How are you treating your mother-in-law?” and so forth-most of them would get well.
That tells me the church ought to be at the forefront of healing, with the medical world as an adjunct.
Like any pastor, I get a parade of people coming through my office every year saying things like “I’ve just been dumped by my wife of fifteen years. She doesn’t want me anymore; she’s moved out.” That person doesn’t need a professional nearly as much as somebody who was dumped two years ago and has been a survivor. The same holds true for cancer victims, the bereaved, parents with kids in jail, the jobless-they’re all needing the touch of an ordinary person in whom the Spirit of God has been loosed.
If we would claim our birthright, we would be that kind of church. The medical world is looking for somewhere to refer people, but they think our business is religion. Our business is life.
I am not saying our primary task is healing. Our primary task is to proclaim and model a kingdom. As we do so, we deploy whole people to introduce others to the King, and healing results.
Copyright © 1984 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
